Iron
by Loki'sMuse
Summary: A mage, cursed and broken. A long-lost prophecy of the end of the world. Warriors of iron. Blood, and love, and deep magic...Fairy tale based on Rapunzel and the Finnish epic the Kalevala. Is Ragnarok really a bad thing? And can love save the cursed?
1. Winter

_Winter._

_Unrelenting, filled with the malice of iron and ice, it came to the land, devouring the green, cracking trees and rock as it went, a nameless God of cold death. Who would dare to name the God, who would dare to acknowledge him as he waged war upon the warmth of Sun? _

_They called him therefore, merely Winter, and hoped he would spare them from his icy embrace._

That word had always spread a chill throughout men's hearts, as they steeled themselves for months of cold, tightened their belts, and prepared for the Season of Wolves. They looked to their mage for the herbs they needed to cure pestilences born of damp and ice, for the charms that could steer a wolf-pack away from their sheep pens, and for the amulets that persuaded the rats to look elsewhere for grain and salted meat. Just what the mage got from all this, nobody ever wondered, or cared. Certainly he himself did not seem to care that they had nothing he could possibly want, these simple folk who had little to think about but food and shelter and surviving the bitter snows that came from the mountains. He ghosted across the land with his pack full of herbs and medicines, and he never stayed long in any one place. The country folk said he lived in a tower carved from blue rock, surrounded by ice, and not even the wolves dared disturb him in his home. No-one had ever been there. He would have welcomed visitors, but there was no-one desperate enough for his company to make that journey, and so he would leave his tower, trudge across the barren steppe, and peddle herbs and amulets for a night by a warm fire, and hot food in his belly. It hadn't always been that way. One day, they would bar their doors against him and call him _nything_, and his bitterness would destroy all they knew, until their land turned to nothing but ice and rock.

The mage, as everyone knew, _was_ the land. It molded itself to him, until he became part of it. This mage was tall, with hair the colour of sunlit snow, and eyes the colour of cold iron with the glint of a bright winter sun in them. He could feel the rock deep down beneath his feet, he could dowse for water and well-springs, call up new Spring shoots and send the trees to rest in Autumn. He could raise his arms and bring in the winds, and he drew ice to him with reverence and joy. He stood straight and proud, yet serenity lived in his smile and his touch was warmth and comfort.

His folk loved him, and the wolves respected him.

When the mage went away, the land fell silent. There was nothing to mark his leaving, not even the prints of his boots in the snow.

Across a lonely waste of ice, he trudged, his head down and his mind closed to the bone-cracking cold. He'd angered the gods, so he did not pray to them. He walked South, for there was nothing North, nothing but the Northers, and _them_, he did not want to meet. Beyond their land lay a dark sea, and only his books told him what was beyond that, for there was no-one alive now who'd made that journey.

He'd burned his books.

And he went South because his blood cried for fire. He left behind him a terrible legacy, something that should never have walked the earth, but by his will of arrogance and ignorance, it did. He sent it North, to the dark island, in the hope that the fog and the ice would kill it, and it would never find him.

* * *

><p>'A few months' supply is all I can give you. The things I need are scarce and rare now. My dear, this can't go on. I don't know how much longer I will be able to help you.'<p>

He took the vial from her, turned it round and round in fingers cramped and crooked with blisters. The bottle was smooth and cold, straight from the North; he craved the chill. 'Thank you,' was all he said.

His visitor sighed, rolling diamond-black eyes whose beauty still had the power to melt his heart. 'Tell me you'll take better care of yourself.'

'I...' he stopped. How to tell her the only way to throw off this malady was to go home, and that he could never do? He'd told her before. She refused to believe him.

She touched his cheek with one finger. 'I am a believer in one truth, and that is that time heals all,' she said. 'You've been gone from Vertland more than two hundred years. Whatever you think you did to deserve this self-imposed exile is surely forgotten by the folk of the North?'

'_I_ haven't forgotten.' He tucked the bottle into a pocket hidden in the folds of his cloak. Though the heat of Cartha reached even this far North, where the forests of the lazy jungle South met his borders, the nights were always several degrees below freezing. 'And as long as I live, I will remember.'

'Then you'll die here.'

'I _know_. I came to die here, or have you missed the point entirely? I'm just sorry it's taking so long.'

Her breath misted the night as she leaned in to kiss him softly on the cheek. Time was, he remembered, when that kiss would have touched his lips, and he'd have returned it ten-fold, with a passion he could hardly remember feeling, now.

'Time is death, and it is also healing,' she whispered. 'Soon one will be, Serthesen. I wish it were the other. Go home.'

'I can't.' He turned from her, to face the star-lit night above him, and snapped his fingers. To draw out the farewell, as they did every other time, would prolong her pain, and he had nothing with which to take it away. So he left her there, and hoped she would not stay for his return, because he didn't intend to.

The lands to the South were strange to a man from the cold steppe of the North, and though this one had called these lands home for longer than he cared to remember, they never lost that strangeness. He was always a traveller, though he returned to the same place each night. He was always a stranger, though he spoke to the same people each day, drank with them, ate with them, exchanged stories with them. He did not have friends. He never allowed anyone close enough to call them that, but he didn't notice the lack. Self-contained and naturally quiet, there were those who said he was haughty, and others who said, with malicious smiles, that he was merely dull.

He was neither. Now, as he picked his way carefully among the stones of the forest path, the shadows seemed to seek him out, wrap him and cloak him in a caressing layer of protection, but it was the tiny ball of light he held in his hand that marked him as a mage. He made for the inn that stood on the edge of the trees, brambled round and dilapidated, but warm inside, and welcoming. Two moments ago he'd landed in a crumple of bruised limbs, sucking in his breath to stifle the scream of pain that threatened to rend the silence of the wood. Fifty miles, as the crow flies. He could travel that far in a mere heartbeat, but it cost him dear. But the inn had two things he wanted: fiery, pain-numbing drink, and gossip. Two things Cartha did not have, and this was the nearest town.

He pushed the door open, flooding the road with golden light, crossed to the bar, and elbowed himself a place. Several faces familiar to him greeted him with cordial smiles, and their owners squeezed up along the bench near the fire and made room for him. The fire warmed him to the point of discomfort, but the night was cold and though he loved the windy darkness, to stand in it would only have prompted some funny looks and awkward questions. _Are you alright? Aren't you cold? Come in by the fire! You'll catch your death._

'Damn cold night, Soufien,' the landlord said by way of greeting. He laughed, a warm, jovial sound. 'Aren't they all, though? You look peaky. A two-shot of whisky?'

'Make it three,' the mage said with a wince as someone next to him squeezed in a little too tight on the bench and bruised his wrist. 'Ice too, if you have it.'

He took the drink and downed half with a grateful gulp. It shot to the back of his throat and burned with a fire that for once, he loved. The ice slid down after it and he leaned his head wearily back against the high hard back of the bench. No-one said much to him, they never did, continuing their conversations that occasionally included him, for his wisdom and far-sightedness. He made no effort to join the talk, preferring to listen. He learned much that way, and gave little away.

The less they knew about him the better, and so they called him _Soufien Nath_ to his face, and the wraith behind his back, thinking he didn't know _that_. He did not give them another name by which to call him, though he had one. He rose again, having emptied his first glass, and ordered another.

The landlord bit the coin Soufien handed over, grunted in approval, and dropped it into the metal strong-box under the counter. 'You're drinking me dry,' he grumbled without rancour. 'Do you know how hard it is to get this stuff? I've a shipment on order but when it'll arrive God only knows - another ship went down off the Port of Lisse last week! It's these infernal summer winds. I wonder at anyone putting to sea in this weather.'

'There are those who can handle their rigs better than that,' said Soufien with a brief smile. 'The Fäärslaans, for one. Iskallan coasters for another. In fact, _all_ Northers can sail any storm. Perhaps your luck will turn.' He didn't think so, however. The winds could last for months, with no letting up until well into Autumn. The land always coped, always rode the storms. He looked around him. The inn's low ceilings rang with loud chatter, laughter, and jokes, packed to the brim with men who'd finished their working day and now wanted nothing better than to drink away the sweat and grime. This was a day before a holiday, and so they'd started as they meant to go on through the next three days. Only he didn't drain his glass the moment it was refilled, but sat quiet and unassuming on a bench with three others, listening to the talk around him.

The rumours were rife again, and though he had heard it all before, he nonetheless thought it prudent this time to offer his own opinions lest they think he was a part of the conspiracy. They knew him well enough in these parts, though his home was three days' ride away. They knew him as well as anybody did...which is to say, not well. He was nondescript in appearance, and though many might have passed him by and thought nothing of him, there was no hiding what he was. His coat, long and dusty, might once have been brown, might once have been grey. Red dust clung to the hem, mildew stained the cuffs. A long tear down the back had been neatly stitched, but there was no mistaking a sword slash. Had it been a strike aimed at_ him_? They'd never know, because they'd never ask. They knew him for a mage, _their_ mage, and they knew a certain pride because of that. Mages chose their stomping-grounds carefully, and if a neighbourhood or town had one, then it considered itself fortunate. Plague and pestilence did not walk where a mage had set his feet. Even_ this_ mage.

'Mistwort?' he said, staring thoughtfully into his glass. 'Are you certain that is the plant this...somebody, whoever it is, is looking for?'

'S'what I heard. Can't say I ever heard of it,' said the landlord, busy wiping glasses with a damp linen towel. Soufien chewed his lip, thinking hard.

'Mistwort? 'S'known as _redruthen_ in our parts! Northers! What do _they_ know?' The garrulous old man in the seat next to him hawked, threatened to spit, and hastily swallowed it again as he caught the landlord's furious eye. Soufien took a long draught of whisky, thinned with lemon-water and salt. Sour, like fiery seawater, the way he liked it.

'Pah. Like as not they'll still come looking here, and you know what happened last time anyone dared hunt for mistwort.' The old man's companion, as old and gnarled as he, chuckled nastily. '1231 it were, in the middle of bloody winter an' all. King Athal gave 'em a bloody good hiding! And served 'em right.'

Soufien nodded agreement, and silently cursed the ancient, long-dead King Athal to the nearest hell. He remembered well those times; he'd been one of the plant's hunters.

'Mistwort's a strange name for a plant that's red as blood,' he put in, his mouth quirking at the corners in amusement. He felt none. Far from it being the Northers they spoke of who lacked knowledge, it was these backwards Southern country folk, as rooted in their ways as any North-eastern sea-mage, who were ignorant. Was that his own fault? Should he have taught them more? Should he have revealed more of who he was?

From the corner came the lively, jaunty notes of a song, the player plucking the strings with an energy he wished he could feel. The music sidled under his skin, slithered craftily into his bones, and made him rebuke it; he had no inclination to give in to light-hearted pleasures. He could not dance, could not risk his feet crushed under another's, or a too-forceful stamp of the foot.

'A strange name indeed, sorceror.' His companion nodded sagely, inspecting the contents of his thick, rough-blown glass with a critical eye. 'Aye, well, my friend, mayhap the mist in the North's red as blood!'

'Then they have never seen blood._ I_ have seen too much of it.' He drained his own glass. He felt suddenly disinclined to join in their ignorance. The rumours, this time, were more than that, he knew. Someone was looking, they said, though they didn't know who. The plant was rare enough, but he knew where it could be found. And he knew what it was used for. 'I have to go, gentlemen,' he announced as he rose. No-one answered him. The musician in the corner was well underway with her song, and her audience was picking up the chorus with gusto. There was a part of him that still remembered how it felt to dance, but he never gave that part credence anymore.

He let the door slam behind him as he left, and turned his collar up against the bitter red winds that blew up from the South.

He knew the plant by yet another name. _Magebane_. Who was it who was looking? He looked to the sky, in the vain hope the answer would reveal itself there, but there was nothing but pale blue shot with rays of pale gold as the sun rose. Whoever it was, they must not find it – he had to see to that at all costs. The damage that could be wrought with it was too great to risk even a single petal. Under his skin, his bones tingled, like glass tapped with a silver cane. He felt the shadow pass over his grave, and felt the exhilaration that could only mean one thing: that whoever wanted the plant was himself a mage.

He knew of only two, besides himself, who knew enough to use magebane, and only one who would _want_ to.

_You would raise your ugly head again and find me, I knew you would!_

After all these years, he was still hated. He wished he could understand.

The mage stamped his foot, howled in pain, and left the country village in a whirlwind of red dust.


	2. Cartha

_There was a key-fiddle somewhere in the hall, its smooth tones ringing out over the cacophony of men's voices. Midwinter. Though dark for much of the day, and even darker through the night, the dwellings of men were lit with flame and candlelight, and hung with greenery and strands of candied nuts and dried fruit. There was no lack of joy, and the mage walked among them all, casting glowing baubles of light into the rafters where they danced like fireflies. The maids wore their white robes on this night, their hair loose and shining, their cheeks aglow. Men's faces were rosy with drink, their boasts hurled at each other with good-natured loud arrogance. The mage's roving eye caught that of a young girl who'd been stealing glances at him all evening, and as he passed by, he caught her around the waist and whirled her into a dance, the key-fiddle joined now by flutes and pipes and drums. The roof-beams resounded with music and laughter, and he thought that life could be no better than this, and if worse was to come, well then, they'd all face it with full bellies and proud hearts._

_He wanted a kiss from the girl he threw carelessly into the dance, following behind her with agile steps and catching her up again, twirling her along his arm and behind him. He heard the ghost of her giggle and grinned; then he felt her hands slide along his flanks and curve round the small of his back as she danced round again to face him. But as he drew her close to take what he wanted, her father snatched her by her shoulder and pulled her back._

_'Not for you!' The man jutted out his chin, his forked blond beard quivering in his indignation. He shoved his daughter away. 'Get back to your mother, wench! I'll have words with you later.'_

_'She is free to dance with whichever man she chooses,' said the mage. He folded his arms across his chest. 'Any maid here is free to choose.'_

_'Still not for you, heathen witch! The one you will have has already been chosen, and I'll not have your hands defiling my daughter too!'_

_So that was it. There was a new religion sweeping the land, its black-robed monks proclaiming peace and compassion, and redemption in the afterlife for all those who would turn coat and swear to the new god. The mage had thought that men raised by the sword would be eager to throw the monks out on their backsides, but it seemed not all men thought them a scourge._

_'You disapprove of the rites,' he said. It was a statement of the obvious, not a question, but the man snarled, grabbed the mage's collar, and smashed his fist into his jaw._

_The mage went down, spitting blood, but was up again in an instant, fire from his fist slamming into the dirt at the warrior's feet. Around them, a circle bereft of people had opened up. If there was to be a fight between a warrior and a mage, then most people wanted to be far away from it. They knew their mage well; they knew he could fight._

_'You don't want to do this,' he told the warrior. 'Trust me. Your daughter isn't worth fighting over. And if you wish to fight someone anyway, then why not fight the son of a bitch who has gotten her with child?'_

_A gasp rang out round the hall, and hot on its heels was a deep, vibrant growl of rage from the warrior's throat. But it wasn't aimed at the mage, who straightened from his fighting stance and walked away into the night, determined to drink as much of the potent värrtir spirits as he could find. Come tomorrow, there would be two lots of blood on his hands, and he wouldn't be able to wash its stain from his soul._

* * *

><p>Soufien knew where he was bound. If he closed his eyes, the images came unbidden, second nature, to his brain, and sometimes he couldn't shake them free, but such was his country. A part of him, the prison of his own soul. He called it home, to himself as well as others, in the hope that somebody, somewhere, would be convinced.<p>

_He_ wasn't.

The high tower of Cartha towered above the canyon, red rock, red sky, and red, red dust. It rose from the rock and pierced the blazing sky, a sheer arrow of stone where no foot could gain purchase to enter. On one side was a desert of gold-red sand, on the other, the sheer drop of the canyon. Such barrenness, it was said, could only come from the heart of the mage who had built it, crumbling the land with his bitterness and hate, turning all hard as iron.

Some others said he was cursed, that everything he touched turned to red dust, a reminder of the blood he'd shed. Innocent blood. For centuries, the stories said, the canyons and mountains had rung with his howls, turning the milk of mothers to sour curds, and the blood of warriors to yellow bile. The walls of Cartha ran red with blood and echoed with screams. Once, the road, now long lost, had been lined with gibbets. The stories said that the crows that crowded the tower's roof were there in the hopes the gibbets would come again...

_The land is the soul of its mage._

But that was a long time ago. No-one alive now knew the real reason for Cartha. The place held no sound more sinister than the endless wind that cried in through the tunnels of rock, and nothing moved in the emptiness save for the gallows-birds that gathered on the roof of the tower to survey the red, red dust. Its owner, when he was there, barely occupied it. His presence, in other places vast and imposing, shrunk in on him when he was here, in Cartha, and he became as a ghost, the wraith the ordinary folk said he was as he moved silently among his books and herb-pots. Even the dust remained undisturbed by him.

His attention elsewhere, he landed badly with a crack of a fragile bone. He silently screamed as he reset it, infusing his own body with numbness, just enough to dull the pain and allow him to hobble to the kettle that hung, forlorn, on an iron hook in the hearth. No fire was lit, but it was only the water he wanted. Taking a handful of herbs from a cracked terracotta cannister, he dropped them into the kettle, swirled the water with his knife, and poured a cup. It tasted foul enough, its colour inky with the plant's black liquor, but for all this he never bothered to sweeten it. He drained it, then sat to let the painkiller work. It was a devillish way to travel, but there was no beast that would carry him, not even one of the mighty winged wyrms from the North. He'd learned the trick from one of the great mages who had once lived, years ago, so many now that he could barely remember a time when he'd not known its secrets.

He had not used his study as such for long years. He hadn't needed to. Even had he sought new knowledge, there was no book that contained anything he didn't already know, and he'd written many of those whose subject was magic. No, this room was little more than a dumping ground, a prison, a hated box he couldn't get out of, not for long. Always Cartha dragged him back, just when he thought he could get the night's cold into his bones, it dragged him back and infused him once more with heat. He'd burn here, he knew. One day.

Until then, this untidy room of dust and relics, was his...home. He had little inkling of what significance that word had these days, but he had no other. Home was where the _soul_ was.

The room, located at the top of the tower, had an air of abandonment that suggested its owner was never there, that perhaps no-one came there anymore. But the pile of broken weapons on the large oak desk said that someone had indeed been there, and continued to go there, adding to the collection with a kind of fiendish indifference to his possessions. The books he left in their place, though they were his too. The dust gathered and shrouded them in forgetfulness, and he didn't care to remember who he'd been.

They - the small folk - called him _the wraith_, because he had no other name to give them, none that he would risk giving. They called him _Soufien Nath_ out of spite perhaps, or respect; he couldn't tell the difference. It suited him. Tall and slender, he ghosted about his world as if made of shadow. His hair, long and silver-white, coiled recklessly down his rigid back in untidy twists, studded here and there with a storm-jewel of hard iron-blue. Some said he'd ripped those from the belly-scales of a mighty dragon, and he didn't bother to dispel the myth. He wore an expression that was at once hard and closed, and gentle with grief, deep lines of sorrow scoring the corners of a mouth that rarely smiled, and when he spoke, it was barely above a whisper. Only his eyes held anything of the man he'd once been, their shape a dark-rimmed almond, their colour a vibrant storm-blue flecked with gold.

Once, he'd been a scholar, and a lover, a powerful man with the world at his feet. He was a ruin now, condemned to wander, a ghost without rest, throughout lands that were far from home. It was a banishment of his own making, a spell he'd woven to bind him away from the place he'd caused most harm to those he'd loved.

And instead of books, he collected the instruments of dead men's pain.

His limbs were liquid now, the plant's healing working well on his bruises. He could risk rising, putting weight on the newly-set bone. There was only one thing he wanted to look at, and that was his land of Cartha, stretching away to the horizon like a sea of blood. On his windowsill there was a potted plant, the only thing that would grow here. Tiny scalloped leaves twined over the rim and about the pot's base, and delicate heart-shaped petals formed flowers whose red was redder than the dust of the land. The mage stroked a finger along one of the stems, half in disgust, and half in reverence. It hurt, this touch of a plant that could kill him. He kept it there as the only thing that could end his life.

Except that he never quite _wanted_ to die. He was quite determined to be damned instead.


	3. A Failed Experiment

The mage Käithenal leaned over the contraptions of glass and copper on his desk, the contents bubbling ferociously within like a restless volcano. White fog misted to the vaulted ceiling of his study, turning his walls away from him and suspending him in cloud. He frowned. It wasn't supposed to happen like this, the ingredients should not react so! He'd spent days setting this contraption up, having finally unearthed the right forumla from a book left behind by a man who'd once been a fellow-student with him. He'd looked for mistwort, failed to find it, and tried several substitutes, all without success. He had the last substitute here now, and this too did not work. It sent the tincture flying to the roof in a sizzle of scalding steam, nearly taking his eyebrows with it.

_No! No, nonono...we need this, we need this, or we are all doomed. Ragnarok, he will bring Ragnarok!_

'Mother of all the gods, damned whore, why do you leave us like this, defenceless?'

He needed the mistwort, and he was sure if he had but a pinch, it would be enough.

'Muttering again, father,' said his daughter, from her corner, where she sat with her head bowed over a large book.

'And does anyone listen?' He addressed that to the ceiling, not caring for an answer from her.

Mistwort, redruthen, _magebane._ He didn't have it. He had the rest - clovenhoof, and salsify, witcharrows, even a pinch of rare starroot. He'd been to the ends of the earth for that, and back again, but still, no mistwort. As a herbalist, this irked him. As a sorceror, it sent him into a furious temper, causing sleepless nights, sickness, headaches, and a tendency to swear at anyone who looked at him funny. It had to be somewhere! It _had_ to grow still, rare as it was, somewhere among the cracks and hollows of this cursed world! There would be a war - this much he could see in the heavens, with his instruments of copper and iron - and the healing power of mistwort would be sorely needed. _A healer without that which he needs the most_, he thought, grinding his teeth savagely. I may as well not _exist for all the good I will be able to do!_

'Iron is rising,' he said aloud to his daughter. 'There will come war, Raven and Wolf, as once told by the gods. The Great War, the last war. The one thing I don't have, I need the most!' He hated her, this daughter of the Southern Country, where the palaces were lit with fireflies and the halls rang with the music of giant cicadas. 'If mistwort exists, then it can be found! So where _is_ it?'

Bored, and too aware of his contempt for her, she turned a page with a loud rustling. Käithenal stalked over and slammed the book shut.

'You're not listening to me.'

'I _am_. It's not as if I can help it, with you yelling at the top of your voice! I assumed your question was rhetorical.'

'Technically,' he said, half amused, half annoyed. Of _course_ he hadn't expected an answer! But he'd expected her to at least acknowledge his problem, offer sympathy...instead she just sat there reading nursery rhymes and getting in his way. Reminding him of her mother. He didn't want to be reminded, ever. And everytime he looked at her, he was.

'There's only one place it can be, since I've looked everywhere else,' he said. 'Take your infernal mount and go find it.'

She peeled herself from her seat without changing expression. 'Give me three days, then,' she said. 'I will have it.'

He snorted. He doubted she'd ever find it, but there was one place he hadn't looked, and only because he couldn't. She'd go there. If the plant was anywhere, it would be there. With _him._ But to make sure she returned, he would have to bespell her. He knew what awaited her in _that_ land. He remembered well the solemn oath he'd taken never to go near that arrogant, murdering, fickle street-magician ever again.

'Come here.'

She obeyed, and he laid his hands alongside her temples, pale gold, smooth and pure. 'Go South, to Cartha. You'll bring the mistwort to me, or you will not, but you _will_ return,' he said, and cast the spell deep into her being. She recoiled, shuddered and jerked, but he did not let go. He'd known they could not love each other from the day she was born, coming kicking and screaming into his domain and sending her mother out of it with equal violence. He didn't care, but there was still some part of him that wanted to hold her close to him. He couldn't do it with love, so he used magic. And while she possessed none of his talents, she had proved an able servant in his arts, and like her mother could ride the great dragons bred deep under the mountains to the North. Hers was a bony wyrm, soft hide and leathery wings, its jaw long and slender, its ears feathered like a gryphon's. Saorse, she called it, though why anyone would bother to actually name such a creature was beyond him.

'Cartha?' She hadn't heard of it, and that was his own fault. He ground his teeth. He did not have the time to start explaining now - he wanted her gone, and on her way to get the blasted mistwort.

'Red rock, red dust, far South, and West, past Korgrimm and further still. You can't miss it. The heat will hit you as soon as you spy the land. Don't look at the sun; you'll be blinded. Take a cloth for your eyes, and take care you don't expose your skin, for you'll burn faster than you know, if the storms of sand don't scour you raw.' He gave her a long look. Black-haired where his was golden, with blue eyes where he had gray, she often didn't seem real, didn't quite seem _his_, but there were times when he saw more than her mother in her. Sometimes, he saw himself. 'God speed, Hanna, my daughter.'

She rolled her eyes, took her coat from the hook on the door, and donned it with a flourish that almost knocked one of his precious glass alembics from the table. 'South it is then,' she said. 'You say you've looked high and low, but I'll bet you've never been as far as you might.' Before he could answer, she slammed herself from the room, the force rattling the bottles on the shelves.

He strode to the window, just in time to see her descend the stone stairs outside the castle. Saorse was curled up in the courtyard, her grey wings folded tidily around her long, thin body. He watched his daughter rouse the beast with a gentle word and a playful squeeze of the nose, then clamber into the ridges between neck and back, settling herself firmly in. She glanced up once, saw Käithenal, and gave a perfunctory wave of farewell.

He watched her leave, grim lines around his mouth deepening with displeasure as Saorse launched herself into the air, a slender, black–haired girl perched high on her neck. He had little faith she'd get what he wanted, but it was his last chance barring a miracle. That..._mage_, that pox-ridden circus-conjurer known as _Soufien Nath_, had a plant, he was sure. They'd secretly taken seeds, years ago when they'd hunted it out to destroy. His own hadn't germinated, and in truth at the time he'd been relieved. But Soufien...he hadn't agreed with their teacher that the plant should be exterminated, either. And he'd been a gardener before he took to studying mage-craft at the age of fifteen. A gardener, and a good one. He _had_ to have got those seeds to grow!

And anything a mage had was for sale, for a price.

He turned back into the room, summoned a light, and bent once more to his studies. Soon, it would be needed soon, the magebane. There was a new Dark rising.


	4. The Mage's Guest

Two pointed leather boots planted themselves firmly in the dust, two slender legs buckled and bore their owner to her knees.

'Whore's bones!' Riding always made her sick – not that she'd ever admit it, least of all to her father. He'd laugh and say it was less than she deserved, witch that she was. She'd never understood that. She had no magic. She couldn't even summon enough energy to light a candle. But he'd been right. She couldn't miss Cartha, if this was indeed where she was, and she supposed it was. There couldn't be more than one place this red, this_ hot_.

Having regained control of her stomach, she rose and took stock of her surroundings. The landscape looked much the same on the ground as it had from the air – nothing but red rock and red dust, and towering above her, a great pillar of rock piercing the azure sky. As wide as her father's castle keep, round and solid. A peculiar-looking abode if ever she'd seen one. There was a dwelling at the top, circular and flat roofed, built on a platform. There was only one window that she could see, and crows cluttered the roof-top, though they made no sound. An eerie silence was all she heard, and the emptiness closed in on her like the walls of a grave. Though no witch herself, she recognised the signs that said here was a mage – and a powerful one.

Her skin crawled at that thought, as if someone had run stealthy fingers down her spine, not quite touching her. She whirled.

Nothing there. Nothing but rock, wind and sky. 'Why have you brought me here, Saorse?' she muttered. As if it were the wyrm's fault. 'Where is this God forsaken wasteland anyway!' Who would call such a place _sanctuary_? Perhaps she'd made a mistake, taken a wrong turn somewhere...but no. Käithenal had been clear. _You can't miss it_, he'd said, and Hanna fought the urge to laugh as it burbled inside her and threatened to scramble free of her lungs. She didn't dare break the heavy silence with her frivolous laugh...

Saorse yawned, then settled down to bask in the sun. Hanna glared.

'Lazy, much? Anyone'd think you'd been flying all day!'

It was no use. The more she spoke, the more the silence crowded her, jostling her like spirits thick with irritation and jealousy. She nearly did laugh at that. Silence,_ jealous_? Of what? She glanced about again, half expecting the mage to be walking toward her over the rock, but she and Saorse were as alone as they had been since they'd arrived. She looked up at the tower. A prison? She thought not. There'd be guards. So, someone's home then, unlikely as it seemed that anyone would willingly live here. The mage? She knew little of mages; Käithenal had only spoken of one in her life, his teacher. She did not think there were any others, but the mark was clear to anyone who'd learned to recognise it, and it was here. It was here, stamped with remarkable possessiveness, all over the tower.

She assumed there'd be a door, or at least steps, since there was an actual room at the top, though the windows and doorway looked more like the grinning eye sockets of a blood-stained skull. But neither door nor steps presented themselves. The doorway she could see at the top opened out onto a narrow ledge of rock, just wide enough to stand on but there were no steps. Climb? She thought not. There were hand and footholds aplenty, until twenty feet from the top, when the rock had been polished smooth by the wind. Or mage-magic. Perhaps, she thought, the way up was hidden – maybe a way in through the ground, somewhere, then up through the inside of the tower? But there didn't look to be anything that resembled a doorway, or even a cave entrance underground. Nothing. No way up. _How odd._

Well, there _was_ a way...she eyed Saorse speculatively.

'Alright, you lazy bag of bones! Up you get. I need a lift.'

The beast grunted, robbed of a well-earned rest, and with a long-suffering snort of hot breath allowed her mistress to mount once more. She launched herself into the air and, once level with the balcony window at the top of the tower, extended a wing so that the tip touched down inside the tower. Hanna carefully walked along the wing and hopped lightly down.

The tower room immediately fascinated her. Carved shelves of dark wood lined most of the wall, only giving way for the window and the hearth. Books lined those shelves, and scrolls had been piled haphazardly alongside them. A heavy round table took up the middle of the room, and on top of the table, she saw weapons. Swords, knives, spearheads, broken shafts. Most were pocked and rusted, the leather hilt-bindings crusted with what looked, to her, suspiciously like blood. She turned her attention to the books, and read their titles with interest. Lore of Plants. Southern Herbs for Healing and Health. The Mysteries of Cartha. Elemental Mage Practice. She wrinkled her nose. She knew the books - she'd read them all herself, having been given them by Käithenal in the hope she'd learn something of the mage-art. They were children's books, he said, _beginner's_ books. He wouldn't give them shelf space. She read other titles, too, but most she couldn't read, since they were in no language she'd ever learned. Bored, she investigated the dirty black kettle hanging over the hearth, and nearly retched when she smelled the contents. She knew _that_ plant too, had had to drink it often enough as a child, to numb pain and give restful sleep, without dreams. There was nothing else. No chair, no bed. Nothing else to indicate that anyone actually_ lived_ here. One thing puzzled her; the room seemed smaller here on the inside than it had looked from out _there_. But no doors presented themselves, and though she half-heartedly rattled a coupld of the shelves, it seemed that this room was all there was.

_The heat, playing tricks on me._

She went to the window to whistle Saorse up again, and stopped short in shock. A man was there, feeding a crow carcass to the disloyal beast, who crunched up the offering with relish whilst keeping one eye on her mistress.

'Hey, you!'

The man looked up.

'Get away from my ride! And how _dare_ you feed her that rubbish? Who do you think you are?'

His voice ghosted up to her, soft and weary. 'If I thought of all the things I am, I would not know how to answer you. What I am not, however, is anyone to fear. I do not corrupt your friend. The crow is fresh.'

'A name is all I wanted,' she retorted, not believing him about the crow. Were the weapons his? Or the books? He didn't _look_ like someone to fear, as he'd said.

He hesitated. Then he looked up again, and even fifty feet below her, his eyes penetrated her soul. 'I'm known as Soufien Nath, to those who know me at all,' he said. 'You may make of that whatever you will.' He reached out, placed his palm flat against Saorse's nose, and sent her promptly to sleep.

Hanna ground her teeth. _Oh wonderful, the mage is home. No wonder I was sent here rather than my father, may the gods slap him black and blue for this!_ 'Great. And how am I supposed to get down?'

'All in good time,' he replied. He had not asked her name, and that offended her. She watched as he unwound a rope from under his coat, sent it spiralling into the air, lengthening as it flew. It caught on a nub of rock just below the window she stood at, and he took hold of the other end, wrapping it firmly about his right foot and around his waist, to take the burn from his hands. And then he was on his way up, the rope shortening inch by inch until it measured no more than a foot in length and he was at the top, climbing in through the window.

He filled the room with his presence, but she suspected that was only a trick, that he could bend light and space about him. Even so, he was impressive. Taller than she, and slender too, he carried himself with an odd delicacy, as if his bones were made of glass. White hair coiled down his slender back like a twist of flax, and in it, storm-gems glinted winter blue. She knew just who he was; Käithenal had mentioned him often enough.

The sharp edge of a book jutted into her spine and she realised she'd backed up against the shelves, away from him.

'My father spoke of you,' she ventured, afraid of him despite his assurance she needn't be. 'Well, what he said was he'd like to grind your bones into lady's boudoir-powder, but I expect you're used to that.'

'Who is your father?'

'Käithenal Herve.'

'I know him. So you're his whelp?'

'His _daughter_.'

He didn't move from where he stood, rigid and imposing, a hair's breadth from the table full of weapons. 'And do you have his talents?'

'No.' What did he see, as he looked at her? Something to fear, or something to kill and be rid of as soon as possible? It was impossible to read anything in his implacable blue eyes, impossible to see any emotion in the hard, immobile face.

'I am Thorakhanna,' she offered, though he still hadn't asked. 'Hanna, for short. It's up to you which you use.'

'Hanna,' he said. He blinked, looked about him as if he'd only just realised where he was, and turned piercing eyes back on her. 'Hanna Herve. Poetic. I have nothing to offer any guest.'

_No,_ she thought, _not even a chair to sit on._ Did he actually_ live_ here? Or was it just somewhere to dump his bizarre collection of war relics? She thought the latter, since there was no bed either. Even mages slept.

'Well I needn't continue to trouble you,' she said, pushing herself away from the bookshelf. 'Wake Saorse up and I'll be off.'

She crept toward the window, one eye on him and the other on the weapons, lest he should decide to grab one and use it. _Soufien Nath_ was a name all had heard, though she suspected that much of what was said about him was nothing more than myth, tall stories told to keep children docile and witches suitably careful in the practice of their skills. She'd never believed those stories, not with a mage for a father, but now he stood before her she realised just how foolish the legends were. He _wasn't_ ten feet tall, and his eyes did not burn with yellow fire. He looked like a man, tall for certain, and imposing, but a man. Not a demon.

She glanced at his feet. Soft boots, dusty brown leather boots bucked with silver that had tarnished.

'I have five toes,' he said.

_How did he...!_

He smiled. 'It's written on your face, lady. You think I am one of Atreyu's demon birds - a shapeshifter Raven. You are afraid of me.'

'I am not!' She forced herself to look in his eyes. Mages liked that. They (or so said Käithenal ) hated people to show fear. Hated shiftiness too, and not looking in their eyes showed shiftiness and fear. 'So you're not claw-footed then?'

'No.'

'Wake Saorse up.'

'Shame on you, Hanna Herve. You've only just arrived, and now you want to leave? What are you here for?'

'You know that already.' He was a mage. If he didn't know, then he wasn't as clever as he looked. 'But I doubt you'd tell me where to find it.'

'Who says I know where it is?' He glanced at the window. 'Magery doesn't bestow all knowledge out of hand. But I will ask you this: if I _did_ have it, and were willing to give it to you, what payment have you brought?'

She hesitated, two feet from the window. If she threw herself out, he would catch her fall with that infernal rope, she was sure. Or magic, which would be worse. 'I have brought no payment. I didn't think I'd be _buying_ it from someone!'

'So you thought to take it? Your father's morals are as pure as ever, then. Shame he doesn't think stealing is wrong.' He moved to the hearth, lifted the kettle lid and peered inside. 'I can give you licorice tea, Hanna Herve, if you'd like a cup?'

His sudden change of tone threw her. Tea? _Licorice_? She'd never tasted it. Käithenal had a stock, but only kept it for the local people of his demesne, when they were ill. He gave it to the midwives, who in turn gave it to young children to teeth on. She did not know if he'd ever given it to her. She nodded her acceptance of a cup of the tea, and folded herself up cross-legged on the floor. Dust immediately coated her clothes, got up her nose and drifted to cling in her hair. But while she sipped her tea, finding the taste strange but oddly pleasant, the question of what she'd come for rose again in her mind.

'What payment would you have for the mistwort, _Soufien Nath_, if you had any?' She too could mock with names.

'I would take none but you,' he said. Behind him, across the window, a filigree of mage-power wove itself into bars, creating a prison. 'Mistwort, redruthen, magebane. It sends mortal men to sleep and gives healing through rest, but a mage, it_ kills_. So I would take you as payment, a life for a life, since I know your father would do nothing with it but kill a mage.' He paused, looked at the bars as if he hadn't known they were there. And then he turned back to the kettle, indifferent to her horror, and _that_ was also written all over her face, she knew.

'But it is not for sale. Even so, you think I'm going to send you back to _him_, with the knowledge that I do indeed have what he wants?'

Thorakhanna opened her mouth to protest, and though she felt the muscles in her throat contract, she could hear no sound. Panic rushed her, unexpected and unprepared-for, and she clapped her hands over her eyes as if to shut out the room and the mage in it, dominating her vision. She opened her mouth again, trying to force a scream out, sure that if she did, he'd go away, leave her alone, let her leave this place of heat and rock.

She could hear no sound.

She _made_ sound, nonetheless. The mage put his hands over his ears and sank to his knees in the red dust on his floor, his eyes screwed tight against the pain. And through it she heard him whisper:

_'Forgive me.'_

She did not believe he meant it.


	5. The Origin of Iron

She raged against the spell Käithenal had put on her, for three days. Several times it dragged her to the window, and up onto the sill, but each time Soufien pulled her back and forced her onto the floor again, fearing she'd harm herself against the iron of his mage-bars.

The fourth day, he found the courage to speak to her.

'Why did he send _you_? Of all people?'

'How should _I_ know?'

'He cannot come here himself, did you know that, Hanna? I barred him entry into my land, years before you were even a sparkle in his eye. I ward the boundaries of my land to warn me of another mage's presence - in his case, he can't cross the wards.' He regarded her slyly. 'Did he really think that such a weak spell as he put on you would prevent me keeping you here?'

Something clicked in her mind. 'He did it to protect me? From you?'

'If you don't think my life is worth protecting, then that's your business. For me, I'd like to choose the time and manner of my demise. _All_ should have that right, don't you agree?' Soufien paused, looking her over with a speculative gleam in his eyes. 'Tell me why he wants the mistwort.'

She refused. 'I don't question him. He would tell me, if he wanted me to know.'

He sighed. 'I imagine he wants to kill _me_ with it, Hanna. So you see why I must keep you here.'

'If I go back without the plant, then what's the problem? You said yourself he can't come and get it.'

'No, but he could send another, and another, and another, until I am too weak to prevent them. He could send an army. I know he has one; I know there are more wyrm-riders that you in the Eastern Seaboard. I can't imprison them all, and I certainly can't fight that many.'

'But you're quite happy to pick on a helpless, lone female and imprison her?' She glowered, and her tone turned jeering. 'What a hero. You can't fight anyone, not even me! You've had to resort to _magic.'_

Soufien suddenly shrugged off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and put the kettle on. In his less-than-skillful wielding of the implements, he revealed something she'd known was there all along and hadn't acknowledged. _Vulnerability_. The word sprang into her head before she had a chance to stop it, hating to give any man credit for emotions, believing them all as hard as her father, who'd never blinked an eyelid or cracked a smile in all her life.

And that, with the spell he'd cast on her, meant two men she didn't understand.

'I would like mine sweet,' she said, watching him set the kettle over the fire and produce two cups from the rubble under the table. A pocket knife slipped from the pile of weapons and landed point-down in the floorboards with a faint 'prang'.

'I have nothing to sweeten it with,' he said. For three days he'd given her unsweetened tea, without a word. He stood and stared at the kettle until it boiled, then threw a handful of sour hawhips and licorice into it.

'No honey?' It was easier to talk of trivialities than the _thing_ between them. Warding, enchantment, _curse._ Whatever name she gave it, it remained the same. She was trapped here in this infernal tower, with nothing but a renegade mage for company. Her prospects didn't look good. And when she didn't return to Käithenal, what would he do?

She took the cup from him, fighting the urge to throw herself out of the window, and sipped carefully. The mage watched her thoughtfully, playing with the rope, then parted his hands. The rope grew between them, and now that it was close at hand, she could see what it was. A fine rope, made of twists of fair hair, glinting like gold in the sun. Before she could ask _what is that_, he slipped it about her waist and secured the other end to the sturdy bookshelf.

'Just a precaution,' he said. 'I have to go out. Your father's spell will wear off in a few more days. In the meantime, I'll feel happier if you're attached to something. I cannot hold you forever against him.'

She glanced at his arms then, and gasped, half reaching out to touch him. His forearms were covered in dark bruises. Livid-blue and dusky pink, the fragility of his bones was betrayed; it was pulling her back from Käithenal's spell that had wrought the damage. He must have needed more than physical strength to hold her, though she was slim and didn't weigh much.

Knowing he would like as not bother to answer, she asked: 'Why not just let me go? Undo the curse? I could just tell my father I couldn't find you or the mistwort. Where is it, anyway?'

'He'd know that for a lie,' said Soufien. 'He _knows_ I have a plant. If you can't see it, it's because I hid it from you. Yes, with_ magic_. And I can't let you go. I already said...' he tailed off, his brow furrowed, and his eyes hazy, as if he'd forgotten what he'd been about to say. 'Drink your tea,' he said instead, annoyed.

She drank it. He was right, it was sweet enough, though she still couldn't make up her about licorice. He smoothed ointment on his bruises, and as he moved around the tower room, careful not to put his feet down with too much force, or to bump into anything, he detailed mistwort's uses.

'It's poison to mage-kind,' he explained, 'deadly, though it takes its time. If I touch it, it can burn me, enough to blister. If I were to take even a small pinch, it would kill me. Its flowers can be used as a dye for cloth, but I can wear no cloth dyed with it. I have no fears on that score since I do not like to wear red and besides, I spent enough of my youth seeking out the places it grew and destroying it.'

'But then why keep a plant?'

'Because I didn't know when I might want to destroy _me_.'

'Falling on your sword not good enough?' She wrinkled her nose at him.

'Requires more courage than I have. Mistwort isn't painful – in fact, most people can use it as a painkiller. It dulls the mind, sends sleep. Permanent sleep, if you happen to be a mage.'

And that brought up her earlier musings. Her father had not mentioned any mage but his teacher, and that had been a woman. Strange this man might be, but he was definitely male, from the chiselled line of his jaw to his narrow hips and long legs, clad in dusty moleskin and thick boots. All Käithenal had said - repeatedly - about Soufien Nath was that he was outlaw, renegade, reprobate. A vagabond herbalist, wandering the earth. Nothing about true magery.

She wracked her brains for any information she'd ever been told about him. Had there been tales of a white-haired mage who wore storm-stones in his hair and who lived in a tower made of blood-red rock? Had there been another name, or perhaps stories of a man whose bones were made of glass, whose skin blossomed with kaleidoscope patterns of purple and green and black every time he took a knock? She went back and back and back, until she came to the bedtime stories told to her by her old nurse, and once or twice even her father. There was _something_ there, some remnant of memory, lumbering through the shadows in her head.

Not _Soufien Nath_, they said. Something else. Maybe_...no_. No, that wasn't it, but she had it, almost, slipping away from her every time she tried to speak it...

He was watching her, his breath hushed still in his body, his eyes guarded. And the name was gone, and she still had nothing to call him but the name he'd given.

'I should get going,' he said, unleashing his breath in a rush as if he'd come to a decision. He untied the rope from the bookshelf then and re-tied it to a large latch-ring set into a door near the shelves. It was further away from the window, just in case. 'The rope's tied fast. You won't fall, don't worry.'

He flashed her a sudden grin. 'You can't escape either, for that matter.'

She glanced at the door he'd tied her to, a door that either hadn't been there before, or she had just not noticed it. She shook her head ruefully. Her normally eagle-eyed observation skills must have taken a day or two off. There was no way on earth that a door that clearly led to another room could have only just come into being. And the room behind it? Where had that been? She'd spent three nights sleeping on the floor, tied to a bookshelf. _If there's a bed through there...but surely he wouldn't be that unchivalric?_

He tapped his foot, impatient for an answer.

'I'll wait here then,' she said, and refused to think what else the tower of Cartha might be hiding.

* * *

><p><em>The bard set down his tankard. 'Refill,' he said to whoever was most eager for his story to be continued. 'There is much still to tell - the origin of Iron must be told, for he is part of this saga.'<em>

_He sipped the foamy brown beer that a young barmaid poured for him. She had heard his tale before, of course, but knew there were many in the inn who had not - and rapt drinkers captured by the mystery and magic in the old legends drank more._

_He continued, his thirst quenched for the moment._

_'There is a hypnotic quality to the ring of hammer upon anvil, the only sound in a cloud-choked silence of a little island wreathed in fog. Fäärslaad was, for many journeyers, the edge of the world, so grey and colourless and rich in nothing but whale-oil and rock that few wanted to venture there. The men of Fäärslaad were hard; men of iron they were, though they were not much given to war. Things are not so now, for they have found their calling as warriors, these men of iron._

_There was one thing that had always set them apart, left them on the edge of civilisation. They had never had a mage, not since the Giant had been sent to sleep in the caverns and the caves of the island's mountains. For hundreds of years, Fäärslaad slept with the Giant, doing nothing but hunting whales and forging tools of iron._

_Then one day a small boat came to them from Iskalla, and within this boat were a mother and her son, both golden-haired, both strange and evil. But such was the cunning of their evil that even they did not know of it, and so begged the islanders for home and shelter, and it was given._

_The boy apprenticed himself to a smith, but no smith of the island folk. He went deep into the mountains, searching for the secret of the Sun, and found the sky-forger, Brínnú, the first among iron-workers. The smith knew him for what he was and spoke to him: dost thou know thy future station? Does thou know the mind of war, the heart of conflict, the tool of destruction? What would thou be, son of Iron? Should I place thee in my magic furnace, thus to make thee free and useful? I will make from thee a weapon of the Gods, forged in Fire, thy oldest brother._

_But then was the young man frightened, much distressed and filled with horror, for Fire he knew would be his destroyer, the furnace a torture he was ill-able to bear._

_But the smith smiled, and addressed the boy again: be not frightened, useful Iron, for Fire will not consume thee. Indeed thou wilt live, andd become as steel, sharp and terrible. Thou wilt be a mighty power - thou shalt slay the best of heroes, thou shalt wound thy dearest brother._

_But straightway Iron made his promise, vowed and swore in strongest accents: by the tongs and by the hammer, by the furnace and the anvil, though I devour the hearts of mountains, I will not slay my dearest brother, shall not wound my nearest kindred. I shall serve my fellow beings, make for them a tool most useful, never be the weapon of warfare, shall not kill or cut my sisters. I will not carry war within me, I will not bring to earth the destruction of the gods!_

_But Brínnú laughed good-naturedly, and said that he would forgive the boy's foolish promise, for in truth he knew it could not be kept._

_Then the sky-forger, Brínnú, first among the iron-workers, set about his work with Iron, hammering and smelting, moulding, tempering, cooling, shaping. Many days they spent together on the mountain, learning the lore of birds and heather, learning lore of rock and ocean. In their footsteps there was only dust, red dust, and black ore beneath their feet where slept the weary Giant._

_But Atreyu's Ravens were ever watchful, and when the sky-smith asked the bees of the heath for honey, sent hornets instead to bring poison and malice. These the boy drank, little knowing, until he felt with dismay and rage a great pain flow through him, crushing bone and wringing nerve and flesh, and he cried out to his master: take, o take me from thy furnace! Spare me thy cruel torture!_

_The smith, surprised, took one look into Iron's core and recoiled in horror. There was no help, no mercy. And Iron raged, broke all his vows and mercilessly cut his brother, madly raged against all his kindred, with Atreyu's poison in him. Bright blood flowed from all his wounds, dark blood flowed from his own evil._

_Then the smith placed this curse upon the Iron: ''curses on thee, cruel Iron! Curses on the steel thou givest! Curses on thee, tongue of evil! Cursed be thy life forever!''_

_The bard drained his tankard, and rose. 'This, then, is the origin of Iron. Now you know the source of Iron, whence the steel and whence its evils.'_

_There was silence in the inn when he finished speaking, and he judged his tale well told. There was just one more thing to say._

_'Thus you know the origin of Iron, but not its ending,' he said. 'This war that comes your way, will surely show you that.'_

_He peered mournfully into his empty tankard, set it back onto the table, and gathered up his cloak. Like midnight it flowed about him, the hood cloaking his starlight hair. He winked. 'Goodnight, my friends, and Othiyi's blessings upon ye, if you happen to need them!'_

_He swept the somber audience a low bow, and left the inn in a flurry of snow, his white hair choked with flakes the moment he entered the night._

* * *

><p>Käithenal watched the return of Saorse without her rider without surprise, though with a great deal of annoyance. He'd spent the last days nose-deep in the old books, searching for a clue. He knew of only one way to defeat a mage - to<em> kill<em> a mage - and he didn't have what he needed. And time was running short. He should have known, should have hunted out the whelp years ago, when he was still in tail-clouts, when he was still suckling at his mother's breast. If the demon-child _had_ a mother, that is. And here was Saorse, back in the Eastern Seaboard with no rider and no mistwort. He summoned his apprentice, Jari Louhtenn, sent the man down to the great wyrm.

'Check her over for anything, anything at all, suspicious.'

'Such as?' The young man's eyes held a spark of malicious interest, and Käithenal made a mental note to ward his door again that night. Mistwort! He must have mistwort.

'She's been sent back to me by another mage, and without my daughter,' he said. 'Use your imagination, boy. She's probably riddled with spells - don't touch her until you know she's clear!'

He glanced at the sky, darkening rapidly, a cloak of violet lined in gold. The stars still hung there, in sync, the same way they'd done for thousands of years. No portents there. None in the earth, either - the crops came in, the eggs hatched, fruit ripened and leaves fell. All the world, the same as it had ever been. Yet in his blood and in his bones he felt the ache, and _knew_. Somewhere out there, under the same vibrant sky, was the one who would bring an end to this world of death and rebirth, and he had come into his power. The mage-towers would fall into the oceans, the land would turn black and the great oaks, the lithe birch and the slender willows, all would burn and crumble to dust.

_Ragnarok._

He didn't feel like knocking upon the Golden Doors just yet. Would the gods rise up and fight, and if so, who? For it was written, and all prophecy came from the ancient Word-Smith, Othiyi, the father of gods.

_I must have magebane. I must fight, come what may, and defy the gods if need be!_

Louhtenn came back shaking his head. 'She's clean.'

Käithenal deflated. He'd been sure that blasted desert warlock would have sent the wyrm back with a spell to kill him! Why hadn't he? And where was Hanna? Still with _the Wraith_? He chased the apprentice out of his study, ordered a tray of cold meats and cheeses from the kitchen, and sat all night chewing his nails and flipping through books, none of which offered him any inspiration, ideas, or answers. In fact, he got nothing but headaches, and had to chew feverfew's bitter leaves for relief.

Near dawn, he slammed the latest book and thumped his fist upon it. 'I am not going to Cartha! Damn you, damn you, _damn you_! I will _not_ come near you, you unholy trickster! I will not break my vow!' He rose, gathered his lungs, and sent the howl out across the earth.

_'Give me back my daughter, or give me the magebane, or I will come and take them both myself!'_


	6. The Rumour Mill

_There was a sea of green corn before him, thick and strong under the soft sun, under the gentle winds. He could feel the dark earth beneath his feet, the energies tendrilling up through his legs and into his sex. He grew hard; he could feel life pulse through him as joy and desire rose in him. The land had slept well through the winter, and now he drew out the Spring and flung it forth across the land, wakening the seeds, encouraging the new shoots to break from the soil and push toward the sun. Tonight, he'd marry himself with the Spring queen; tonight, his own seed would unfurl and grow inside her, the most fertile place of all._

_Tonight, he would feel again the primal, all-consuming fire of the land rage through his blood, the good black earth beneath her buttocks, cold sky above his as they consummated desire and created life. _

* * *

><p>The woman behind the counter of the soap-shop also sold ladies' linens, and though she wasn't used to selling them to a man, she did her best to be helpful, curbing her disapproval that this particular man should want such items.<p>

_He_ could do nothing but look helpless and bewildered.

'Is all that necessary?'

She cast a glance over him, taking him in for all of two seconds, then puffed air into her cheeks and let it out again with a sigh. 'I don't know about _necessary_, young man, but what I do know is she'll not thank you for scrimping. I mean, the bare essentials are at least a chemise, knickers and stays! I suppose you could leave the stockings, but...'

'I don't think she wears them.' He tried to be amused by her calling him _young man_, and failed.

The woman looked scandalised. 'Not wear stockings? Good heavens! Where did you meet her?'

'She's from the North.'

'Oh. Well, in that case...look, take chemise, knickers, and stays...'

'She doesn't wear stays either.' He was fairly certain of this. Leather riding gear did not suggest corsetry, no matter how hard his imagination worked to incorporate it.

'I must say, young man, they do things very differently in the North! Very well. Chemise and knickers it is. Anything _else_?'

Her tone had turned distinctly disapproving, and he became anxious to leave. 'Soap.'

Soap was added to his purchases, and he paid absently, handing over three large gold coins without even looking at them. The woman gawked. He could guess what she was thinking: _gold! pure gold! But he looks so...ragged._ He hid a smile, the first genuine smile he'd revealed for...as long as he could remember. 'I will have whatever else you say I need,' he added, unwinding a little. She took a pumice from a carved box and added it to the pile, and two long ribbons of green silk. Her look said plainly that she couldn't understand why he'd take silk hair ribbons but forgo stockings and stays, but she said nothing, and already he knew he was slipping from her memory. He took a storm-stone from his hair, let her see it, then pushed it across the counter to settle with the coins. It was not generosity. Mage-bound, once she'd touched it that stone would ensure her silence should anyone come asking about a mage and his business in the town. Käithenal may not come himself, but he had many others at his beck and call, and Soufien did not know who or what to expect. It paid to be careful.

He picked up the package and took his leave, and went to find the inn. A stiff drink was all he wanted, and a chance to hear whatever rumours were circling.

He wasn't disappointed, and he sat with his salted lemon whisky and soaked up some of the most ridiculous gossip he'd heard in a long time.

'There's a war brewing, you mark my words.'

'There's_ always_ a war brewing!'

'Over a girl, I heard! They say she's the daughter of a dragon-mage. And a foul beast from the South has her imprisoned in a tower soaked in the blood of virgins.'

'That _Norther_ mage has got an army of dragon riders. Going to send every last one against the fiend who's stolen his daughter.' That speaker said _Norther_ as if it were the vilest curse he knew. Soufien hid a smile. Being Käithenal _was_ a curse, as far as he was concerned.

'Aye, and it would be nowt more'n the thief deserves! Poor lass, kidnapped, imprisoned, held to ransom! Why, I bet any one of us would gather an army of dragon riders too, were it our own women-folk taken in such a manner!'

Soufien nearly choked. _Thief? Kidnapped?_ 'Excuse me, but who is it that has taken her?'

'Some ragged-arse mage from the devil-knows-where,' was the reply. The speaker looked him up and down, and his eyes lit on the storm-stones in his hair. '_You're_ a mage.'

'I am. You know this. So what?'

'Well, I...'

'Now come on,' said Soufien briskly. He knew these people; knew them for superstitious folk, suspicious of strangers and incredulous of gossip and rumour. Whoever had been grinding the rumour-mill round these parts had known it wouldn't be long before hysteria ran like wild fire through the peasant towns and villages...and soon enough get back to him.

Käithenal was a wily old fox. And perfectly capable of taking a man apart by destroying his reputation. Well, that had to stop, or there'd be a pitchfork lynch-mob at his door before too long.

'No mage would steal away what belongs to another mage,' he said. The drinkers stared at him insensibly. He scrabbled in his mind for something that they'd be able to understand. 'It's...it's against the honour code!' There was no such thing, but instantly their eyes lit with understanding, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

'Well, who's been saying these things then?' demanded one man, a rough young man with a drooping eye and a thick thatch of black curls. 'You saying it's lies, Soufien?'

'Not lies, I guess,' said Soufien carefully. 'But maybe...maybe it has not been told right. You know, it's true the girl is missing from her home. But it's not true that she's been taken from there against her will! Indeed, she came to visit me. The daughter of a friend. No more than that.'

They looked as if they didn't quite believe him, and he didn't blame them, since it was only half the truth. But no-one questioned him further, being more concerned with enjoying their drinks than discussing his possible digressions that may or may not lead to a war.

_And as they say, there's always a war brewing..._

He heard it then, the echoes of Käithenal's promise. And he flung one back in return.

'By all the gods of this earth, you stinking little market-witch, I will _never_ let your daughter return to you! Find me, and fight me, but you will _not_ win!'

He looked round at the stunned drinkers. 'What are you _looking_ at,' he muttered, and tossed two coppers to the landlord for another drink. He glanced, his shoulderblades suddenly pricking him with unease, over his shoulder.

'Don't worry,' the landlord said. 'No-one's jumping you on _my_ watch.'

'Thank you,' said Soufien.

The landlord nodded at the package under the mage's arm. 'So it's true then? You _do_ have this North-lander's daughter?'

'He sent her for the mistwort he wants. You've heard _those_ rumours. I am half tempted to send him the plant after all.'

'And I hope that if you do, you know what you're doing.' The landlord slid a half-full bottle of whisky across the bar. 'Take that with you. I'll bet _she_ wants a drink, even if you don't.'

_That was likely,_ he thought, with another of his small smiles. And that reminded him. She'd want food too, and there was none left in the tower. Usually he took his meals, erratic as they were, in some town somewhere. And in Cartha food spoiled within hours...he had no idea how to cook. They'd been living on hard bread and crow eggs, for the three days they'd spent battling Käithenal's spell.

The landlord, sensing the train of the mage's thoughts, leaned over the bar. 'Go down the street to Madam Kinsey's place. She'll set you up with a dish of casseroled beef for a half-silver, or curried fish if you think the girl will eat it. Tell her I sent you.'

Feeling like a green youth, he did as suggested, and found Madam Kinsey both generous and garrulous.

Soon enough, he'd known the word would get around that the mage in Cartha was keeping a woman. He couldn't have hidden it for long, not with his purchases of feminine linens, soap, ribbons, and extra food. Some said she was a princess, the King of Feland's daughter. Some said she was a runaway felon, gone to him for what his land offered, sanctuary. Others still came nearer the truth; that she was his payment for services rendered. He hadn't expected it to be common knowledge just yet; how did they know? Had Käithenal put the word out for his daughter already? The man had always moved fast.

He decided he wouldn't bother to dispel any of the rumours, letting the folk talk to their heart's content and confirming nor denying nothing. Let them have their fun. He had his hands full enough as it was.

Not that Hanna was deliberately a nuisance. On the contrary, she did her best to keep out of his way, and swept Cartha's great tower free of the red dust each day, ground his herbs when he asked, brewed tea and had even managed to launder his shirts. She read his books, pored over his notes, and boiled crow eggs over the fire. And she hadn't looked for the mistwort. He checked it each night, once she was asleep; tended it and watered it, and then hid it again. No, he thought, she gave him no trouble at all, except when he had to drag her back from the tower's windows. No trouble.

There was something about that that struck him as wrong. The last woman he'd given space in his life to had caused him no end of grief, headaches, and frustration. He owed everything to her, especially his love of solitude. He expected any other woman to be the same. In the taverns he drank in, the men complained bitterly that their wives would drive them to their graves with scolding and nagging, and Soufien was very glad he did not have a wife.

The cook gave him a good look, added a fat apple-cake to the basket of food, and dropped her bombshell.

If the rumours he'd heard in the tavern had frightened him, the ones he heard from the soup-maker made his blood run cold.

'Have you heard? The mage in Fäärslaad's sailing for Vertland.'


	7. News from Afar

'Mmm, that was incredible,' said Thorakhanna, mopping up the last of the curried fish with a slice of soft bread. Seated on a cushion now, she looked almost comfortable amidst the chaos of the tower. He'd got the mouldy old thing from a junkyard shop, shaking out the spiders and ignoring the smell of mildew. It had been a last-minute find, as he realised she'd been sitting on bare floorboards for three days. For himself, he never noticed the lack of such simple comforts, but something in his memory, something he'd once known of women. They liked soft things, pretty things. _Pretty_ was currently beyond him. He picked up the first thing he found. Hanna said the pattern was hideous, but that it didn't matter since her arse would be covering it most of the time.

Hanna dumped her empty dish on the table, dislodging a dagger, and sat back against the wall. Soufien paced the room, gnawing his fingernails down to the quick. His hair was dishevelled and his eyes were wild, but no amount of nagging had made him reveal the source of his anguish. He'd come in furious, almost hysterical, and thrown his packages at her as he landed with a crack of fragile bone, too angry to notice the pain, though a fireball flung from his outstretched hand gave away just how upset he was. Luckily, she'd dodged it, having got used to similar outbursts from both her father and the young wyrms in the kennels who hadn't yet learned to master their fire and spewed it willy-nilly.

But she knew now how much it cost him to travel the way he did.

He had his back to her, so that she didn't see him wince everytime he moved. He'd slapped the kettle on the grill to boil, and fractured a small bone in his wrist. He could almost feel the splinters poke through his skin. He covered it with his other hand, called up the cold within him, and reset the bone. 'I heard...'

'What did you hear?'

He spun round, startled. He hadn't heard her get up from the cushion and come to stand at his elbow. 'That...that the harvest will be good.'

'Fine, don't tell me!' She poked her tongue out at him. 'I expect that whatever my father's cooking will be no match for your powers, though? He's nothing but a _stinking market-witch_, after all.'

'You heard that?' Shock pierced him to the core. She'd said she didn't have Käithenal's talents! But only a mage could hear a mage-bound oath, sent out over thousands of miles, across the world. 'Did you hear what he called _me_? An unholy trickster.'

'No, I didn't hear that._ Are_ you an unholy trickster?' She tilted her head on one side and looked up at him with sparkling mischief in her eyes. Cornflower-blue, deep as the Southern Sea. For a moment he was mesmerised, then he tore his gaze away and turned back to the stove. The kettle screamed like a banshee and he tipped licorice into it, stirred it, and poured it into two cups, sweetening hers with the raw molasses he'd brought. The result was a gloopy black liquid, steaming in a chipped china beaker, but she seized it eagerly and sipped.

He took up his own cup and folded up on the floor under the window. He had no cushion; he'd brought back only what she needed. Part of him wanted to tell her what he'd heard, that the mage in Fäärslaad was on his way to Vertland. But part of him didn't have the energy to tell such a long story - and she was sure to want all the details, right from the beginning - so he held his tongue.

She, for her part, seemed happy to let him keep his silence. 'What's in the packages?'

'Linens, soap - things for you. Drink your tea, then open it.'

_Linens, soap._ He sighed, and nodded at the door that had appeared earlier. 'You can have that room as yours.'

She got up, opened the door, and peeked inside, never bothering to question its existence. _Why would she_, he thought. She was a mage's daughter. She was probably used to rooms that weren't there before, and people who could shout an insult across a million miles and be heard by the recipient.

'Very nice,' was her verdict, curtly spoken. She returned to her cushion and tea. 'One would almost think you'd actually seen a lady's chamber for yourself.'

_Ah._ 'I have,' he said. 'I had a wife, once.'

That shut her up, but she couldn't help a glance at the rope of hair wrapped around her waist.

'Not hers,' he said.

'Macabre, if it was,' she said. 'But then, that's what they say about you, isn't it? Why don't you tell them otherwise? Why do you let people think you're a monster?'

When had he given her the impression that he wasn't? When he'd saved her from breaking her neck on the rock below? Or when he'd brought her molasses, fish curry, and a cushion? He glanced at her. She was watching him, like a bird watching a cat, not really afraid, but aware that at any moment, her insolence could be punished.

'It keeps people from trying to get into Cartha,' he said finally, and let his eyes slip from hers. Somehow, he knew, he would have to find a way to keep her breaching his walls. 'But I don't know for how long. I think I have to leave here, and...' _And what? Go back to Vertland and confront the evil currently under sail there, and destroy it?_

He laughed.

'I hate it when you do that,' muttered Hanna as she set about tidying the table's burden of blades. His nostrils flared. 'And no need to look so wan. I just wish you'd tell me what news you've heard. It's got you all worked up, so my guess is my father is also tearing his hair out.'

'He might be. He was always overly fond of his hair.' He gave her a lopsided smile, and relented a little. 'It...may be nothing to worry about.'

'But you _are. _Worrying, that is.'

'Hmmm.' He shrugged, the movement stark and hunched on his slender form, making him look for an instant like a vulture. 'It is mage business. It concerns my former...ah...home. If you can call it that. More so than here, anyway. I'm not sure what to do.'

'What _is_ there to do?' Ever practical, Hanna believed in eliminating all impossibilities first, then to concentrate on what was possible. It was something Käithenal had taught her, in his distracted, disinterested way.

Soufien gave her question the consideration it deserved, sitting cross-legged and rigid-backed on the floor by the window. 'I could meet him head-on, I suppose,' he mused. 'Except that I lack an army. So that's out. Or I could curse him - plead your father for a hex, in exchange for you.'

'He'll tell you to piss off.'

'Yes,' said Soufien. 'He likely would. The other option is to disguise myself, and take poison to him in feigned friendship.'

Hanna was shocked. 'That's a bit underhand, even for you!'

'You have no idea how low I can go,' he agreed.

'Who are we talking about, anyway?' She fixed him with a narrow-eyed glare that unnerved him. 'An enemy of yours?'

'An enemy,' he said, rising, 'of the _world_. And don't get any ideas. You're staying here, safe! Neither myself nor your father would ever drag more people into this than we must. War is indeed coming.'


	8. A Dream of Poison

He dreamed that night, disturbing dreams that had him waking in a sweat, shaking and weeping. He dreamed his downfall, his failure, his inability to put right the wrong he'd done the world. He'd always known he'd pay; he'd always known that running to Cartha wouldn't get him off the hook forever. The gods were patient. They could afford to be, for they as well as mages were immortal.

But he'd never factored in the appearance in his life of a mage's daughter. A beautiful, gold-skinned, black-haired daugher with eyes that penetrated his soul and laid bare his secrets.

And that wasn't all she could see. In his dream-tower, the red petals of his precious death-flower shone like gems of blood on the windowsill.

_She can see it! She...what has happened?_

He looked at his hands, spread before him palm-down, pale and slender and broken. Something wasn't right, something had _happened_ to him, and it wasn't good. He called up power, let it crawl along his veins and ball up in his right hand, ready to flame. But then it died, faded away like a gust of wind to a candle-flame, and he was left empty.

Magic had deserted him.

And with it, the ability to heal, and stay together.

He woke, and screamed in agony as he hit the floor, having rolled too far near the edge of his bed in his dream.

* * *

><p><em>'That plant is evil,' said the sorceress Erismen. 'It must be destroyed!'<em>

_For days now she'd tried to convince them all that magebane must go, that no trace must be left to harm any mage. There were few left, blood had weakened and thinned, and now it was rare that a child with the right talents was born to take up the learning. She looked at the four before her now, all students of hers, one time or another. There was Serthesen, with his delicate, elfin face, his white hair coiled down his back like a twist of ice, his eyes distant and far-seeing. He would never say what it was he looked upon, but it was in his eyes the mage-mark could be seen. Serious and quiet, she had once constantly looked for his smile, and revelled when it came._

_She turned to Käithenal. Golden-haired and heavier than Serthesen, he reminded her of one of the Norther warriors. He was sharp and clever, with an ever-present smile that dimpled his cheeks and could light an entire room. But, she thought, his tongue was sharp and he had the coldness of heart that allowed him to turn his back on those who needed him, sticking religiously to his cause and what he perceived as right._

_He spoke now, as she'd expected he would. 'The plant has many benefits,' he pointed out. 'To destroy it would be a disservice to the world.'_

_'To allow it to continue to grow would be a disservice to us,' she snapped. 'Or do you want to spend the rest of your life having your food checked for traces of it? It can be used to kill you!' That was not the reason she wanted it gone, and the thought of what she was doing drained the blood from her face. He was not yet born, the one who would bring Ragnarok, but he would be, and he must live to fulfill his destiny. He must!_

_But neither Käithenal nor Serthesen had any idea of what must come, for they had not read the books hidden away on Fäärslaad. The other two, she had no thought of - they were weak, they would be easily dealt with, when the time came, if they even lived that long._

_Käithenal shook his head in disapproval of her selfishness and short-sightedness._

_'I am a healer,' he said stubbornly. 'Must I do without the one plant that can take away pain and give restful sleep?'_

_She gave him a scornful glance. 'Have I taught you nothing, Kai? You have the power to heal without herbs.'_

_'It drains.' Serthesen shifted in his chair, where he'd sat silent and still. 'And you have taught us both well. Your teaching was that if there is a herb that will do what mage-power can, then it should be used. And yet you'd have us destroy that herb.'_

_But she was unrelenting._

_'If you will not remove magebane from the world, then I will do it myself,' she declared. She glared at them both, her upper lip curling into a sneer. Time was she'd loved these two, her brightest, had rejoiced in their strength and intelligence. Now, it was that she cursed. She turned to the other two mages, half-trained neophytes who had not even a quarter of the knowledge and training Käithenal and Serthesen had. They'd agree to seek out magebane and destroy it._

_They did, already buckling on weapons and bandage belts in their eagerness to be gone. Perhaps they wouldn't come back._

_'If you want it gone,' said Serthesen, rising,' then gone it shall be.' He bowed formally and strode out of the room._

_Käithenal also rose, and gave her a dimpled smile. 'I'll keep an eye on him,' he said. 'You know he can't be trusted to do a thorough job.'_

_'After the protests you have made, I wonder if you can?' Her tone was sharp, and he flinched._

_'I acknowledge that magebane is dangerous, and I bow to your superior knowledge, for after all it is _you_ who have been _my_ teacher,' he said. 'As he said. If you want it destroyed, then we will see it destroyed.'_

_She did not question his change of mind. She never did, for she knew him to be fickle and changing. He always protested at first, but he always, eventually, saw things her way._


	9. A Poor Substitute for Truth

The days passed in the tower in a haze of infernal red dust, just as they always had, at least when Soufien had been there. But though little had changed, to all outward appearances, there was something the tower had not had before, something it didn't quite know how to accommodate. Hanna's presence disrupted the usual atmosphere of fatalistic depression as she took its transformation from prison to home in hand. She threw out the weapons, flinging them one by one from the window as Soufien was just returning from a trip to a sea-town somewhere far to the East. She was alerted to his arrival only by an agonised howl as a sword-hilt struck him across the arm.

She looked out, astonished. 'What a place to stand!'

'Let that rope down, and I'll come up,' he said through his teeth. He was clutching his shoulder, his face drained of blood. 'Quickly! Pay it out through your hands, it will lengthen.'

She did as he bid, surprised that she could use the rope the same way he did. He locked a loop of it around his foot, and another around his wrist, tugged, and came up the tower. She still wore the rope around her waist, and though she asked each night if she need wear it any longer, he always said the same thing: that he wouldn't risk it just yet.

She gave him a long look as he hobbled to the kettle and tipped a generous measure of pungent-smelling herbs into it. Bruises were already spreading over his skin, raising the finely-dusted gold hairs on his arms. He looked bejewelled in the sunlight, all amethyst and gold, ruby and emerald. A drop of blood hung from his nostril and he wiped it impatiently.

'_Ask_, then.'

'Tell me without me asking.'

His back stiffened. 'I don't want your pity.'

'You're not getting it. I just want to know what's up with the constant painkillers.' Every day he took the foul-smelling infusion, throwing it down his throat with a grimace. He did so now, wiping the last drops from his mouth with a shudder of disgust.

'Travelling the way I do thins the marrow,' he said. 'My bones are held together by sheer will, and not mine alone. One day, it will kill me.' He paused, laughed - the first time she'd heard him do so. 'And there is your father, spending his days looking for a way to end mine! I hope I live long enough for him to know he's wasting his time.'

She sucked in her breath, regarded him solemnly, then gently shoved him out of the way and took up the kettle to make a pleasanter brew than the one he'd just drunk. 'Sit down,' she said. 'Before you fall down. I've never known anyone so fragile! It's a wonder you don't fall to pieces everytime you get out of bed in the morn...' She stopped. Where exactly _did_ he sleep? There was no room here but hers, and the room they now stood in, cluttered with books and a handsome oak table marred with the scratches of myriad blades. Unless there was another room, and he kept it hidden, as he'd hidden hers, at first. But why he should do that, she couldn't think. Mages had their quirks, after all.

'I brought you something,' he said then, and reached inside his shirt to bring out an ivory comb and two ivory sticks. 'For your hair.' He seemed to have forgotten his blind panic of a few days before, and since he hadn't mentioned it, neither had she.

Surprised, she took the gift with a smile. 'Thank you.'

'I considered...I have little recollection of what women like,' he said. 'Name what you want when next I go, and I'll bring it.'

His eyes slid towards hers and she caught his gaze, gold-flecked and a little shy.

'Anything?'

'Within reason,' he laughed. 'I must be able to carry it.'

The next time he went, she asked him for linen, and when he brought it, breaking in several places and sinking under the weight of the pain, she tore it into strips and proceeded to wind it about his limbs, tight and firm. He was surprised enough to laugh at her, but there was little humour in his laugh.

'It won't help,' he said.

'You asked me what I wanted. So I told you. Now shut up.' She went back to her winding, tying off the ends in knots that even mage-craft would be challenged to undo. 'There,' she said at last. 'I'd like to see your bones break now! If they _dare_.'

'What bones _could_, with you waiting to find them out?'

And then he realised something. It had been three days since she'd last asked him if she could take off the rope of golden hair.

She asked him about it later that night, as they sat opposite each other in the chairs he'd finally brought for them. A mage-light lit the room, and outside, Cartha was bathed in star-light. Neither had spoken for some time, each engrossed in private thoughts. But the memory of his bruised arms dusted with gold had haunted her for several days, and finally she'd realised why.

''The rope...it's yours, isn't it?'

He looked up. 'No.'

_Of course not_, _don't be silly_, she thought. _His hair is white, the rope is gold_. Pale, fine gold, soft as silk. She looked at him, trying to understand what lay under the icy-cold of his exterior. What manner of man had he been? Had he been...handsome? She caught his gaze, and shivered. Almond-eyes, blue as a storm in summer. Delicately chiselled jaw, firm mouth, nose like a knife. His cheekbones stood out sharp under his skin. His limbs were nothing more than white paper over glass, so delicate, so fragile. He hid that well, but not well enough. But despite his fragility, and his bitterness, she could see well enough that there was beauty there too, and she didn't have to look hard. Surely there was a woman somewhere who had lost her heart to him? The owner of the hair?

His eyes turned steely, daring her to ask, watching her like a crow might watch something it knew would be dead soon.

But she had a thicker skin than that. She had a mage for a father, after all! So she asked. 'So what was her name?'

'Whose name, Hanna?'

'You're not going to fob me off with that attitude,' she said severely, leaning forward to glare at him. 'If that hair isn't yours, then it must belong to a woman. Otherwise why would you keep it?'

He laughed. 'Why shouldn't I keep it? No matter whose it is!'

'You have a story to tell me, and your name too,' she said then. 'Tell me. If I'm to stay here with you, I must _know_ you!'

* * *

><p>Käithenal grinned humourlessly and pinched the dried mistbane flowers into the copper pan heating gently over a tiny flame. The plant's powers were brought out by heat, but heat it too fast and the effects would be destroyed. He had to be careful. The woman who'd brought him the dried flowers lay now in his bed, thoroughly rumpled and happy, taking his loving as her payment. What she thought he didn't know was that she'd taken another fee, in the form of three golden hairs from his head. She'd tied them around her little toe, where he wouldn't look.<p>

He wasn't that easily robbed. All those who practiced magic knew what could be done with a few strands of hair, or a couple of nail clippings, even a drop of blood or semen. Usually he was careful, but not these days. He was _desperate. _

_And it wouldn't be the first time I've lost my hair to a sorceror!_

As he worked, Käithenal uttered a steady stream of curses, gloatings, and oaths through the muslin cloth he wore over his nose and mouth.

'Serthesen, oh, how I wish you could see _this_, you scurvy little prankster! Aha, yes, I have your name too, always have - what, did you think I'd forget _that_? And how pathetic of you to hide it! But I promise you, I will have my daughter back, and your life with her! You are welcome to rot where you wish, but rot you will, oh yes! Serthesen, Serthesen...Serth..es...en...'

He whipped the pot from the flame with a sudden yowl of anguish. The mage-bane, he was fast discovering, was not as easy to work with as he'd hoped. Even its smoke was too poisonous for him to tolerate. And he'd burned it, wasting what the witch had brought. He routed her out of bed with a hand made rough with anger, and flung her out of doors.

'Come back for another romp by all means, but you'd better bring me more of that herb!'

'I have no more!' she protested, and spat at his feet. 'If it was_ that_ abundant, you'd have your own supply!'

He didn't bother to reply to that, and slammed the door in her face, stamping back up the stairs to his study with footfalls loud enough that he roused the entire castle. He heard Saorse's querulous chittering, and once more he cursed his life-long enemy, the man who had forced him once to hand his daughter's freedom to him. He'd got nothing out of it after all, and he was beginning to miss her company.

_Gods, if I go on like this much longer...!_


	10. Part Two

_Part 2 _

_The birds were silent the day Erán Närgaard was born. He too was silent, a small, pale-haired child with round blue eyes that would later turn to a pale sea green in affirmation of his parentage. Serthesen had expected there to be noise; squalling or gurgling or whatever sound babies made, but his son remained silent._

_He didn't pick the child up. He reached out a hand as if he would touch him, but then drew it back, tucked it away in the pockets of his greatcoat. He stood and stared, having nothing to say, and wondered what on earth he had done._

_And Erán stared back. There was an awareness in the child's eyes that Serthesen knew was absent from all other babies; everyone knew to wait nine days before naming children, waiting to see if the soul of dead kin should return, but in this case, this was a new soul. And a fully-formed one. Serthesen shuddered. _

_The woman holding the child smiled dotingly on him, and looked up at the dour, silent mage. 'Won't you hold him? See, he has your eyes.'_

_'He has not my eyes,' answered Serthesen. Nonetheless, he bent his head dutifully, and peered at his son._

_In his eyes Serthesen saw what the child would become, and he turned on his heel and walked away, never to look at his son again._

_On the tower, the ravens watched, barely a feather stirring. Atreyu was already aware of Erán's existence, and saw what the mage had seen. But he saw something else, too – he saw that the boy would walk in shadow, and wear the troll-mark. And he knew that he would claim Erán's life for his own._

* * *

><p>'I am going to the town across the dunes,' Soufien said. Hanna was sitting near the window, gazing out over Cartha, though there wasn't a lot to look at. Nothing but red dust, an entire flat desert of red dust. 'I forget its name, but there is a gypsy market new arrived. Shall I bring you anything, Hanna?' He wore the silver troll-rings on his fingers, long delicate filigree that covered each slim finger from knuckle to nail. Somehow, they made him look demonic, these confections of metal, like butterfly claws. He'd lately taken to wearing them, though she'd never seen them before.<p>

Hanna looked about the tower room and its contents, and shook her head. He'd only been back a few days, from the last trip, and she couldn't imagine why he'd want to go off across the sands again so soon. And she had all she needed. There wasn't a lot _to_ need, shut up in a hot red tower with a man who spoke about one sentence an hour. 'What things?'

'Anything, anything you like.' He spread his armoured hands, guilt flitting across his face for an instant then settling in his eyes, shadowed by long pale lashes. 'There must be _something_.'

There wasn't, but she named something anyway. 'A lyre.'

'You like to play?' He was surprised, and she almost laughed. In the weeks she'd known him, he had never once shown any inclination towards music. Not even a whistle.

_But then, she thought, neither have I_. _Cartha is not a place in which to be musical. Oh, when can I leave here?_

He nodded, said that he would bring her the finest harp he could find, and left suddenly in a whirl of red dust.

Hanna sighed, suddenly bereft of the one thing that kept her sane, cooped up in a tower that burned by day and froze by night. Soufien was strange company, but he was growing on her, day by day. Little more talkative than Käithenal had ever been, he nevertheless enlightened her on many subjects concerning magery, taught her card tricks, and occasionally told her stories from ages long past. There was, however, one thing he would not speak of – his own past. She riffled through his books and scrolls, hoping for clues, but found nothing. Either he'd never written anything down, or he'd been very thorough in destroying it. She thought the latter. Mages wrote; Käithenal wrote like a madman, about anything and everything, obsessively cluttering up his fortress with scroll upon scroll, shelf upon shelf of books. Nothing Soufien had could be considered any real use to a mage who knew his craft so well. Books her father would have scorned, or burned in his hearth, determined to get _some_ use out of them. They were relics of a time gone past, artefacts from someone's earlier days...but whose, she couldn't guess.

She read them anyway; traced the neat, precise handwriting that marched across the pages with flourishes and embellishments. _A woman's hand_. Was that why he kept them? Who was she? The wife he'd spoken of days before, with a wistful shadowing of his eyes?

Jealousy stabbed her in the gut, and she slammed the book shut, shoving it back on the shelf with a loud sigh. He'd never part with his secrets unless he wanted to. Still, she couldn't help but imagine the mysterious ex-wife. Her imagination provided the woman with luminous dark eyes, and lustrous hair, curves to make a -

Serthesen landed in at the window with a yell and a crunch, then righted himself shakily.

'You're back then,' Hanna said impassively. She'd learned quickly that he hated sympathy and fuss. He nodded.

'Not staying,' he rasped, still fighting for control over the pain. 'Got to go to Vertland. Pack up, Hanna. I'll drop you off at the Eastern Seaboard. I consider your time here done and your father's debt paid. There is war at hand.'


	11. Curses on Iron

_For years the sky-smith fought to bring the poison from out of the mage Iron, who had been named in the language of Fäärslaad, Erán. They imprisoned him deep within the highest mountain, barred his doors with stone and rock, roofed him over with black slate, gave for him a bed of granite. And still the fire raged through him, never cooling. He tore at his own flesh 'til it hung in ragged strips of blood from his bones. He screamed day and night, uttered curses and bewailed his existence, over and over: _

_Curses on thee, cruel iron! Curses on thee, tongue of evil! Now forsooth thou hast grown mighty, thou canst rage in wildest fury; thou hast broken all thy pledges - all thy solemn oaths have broken! Like the dogs thou shamest honour, shamest both thyself and kindred, tainted all with breath of evil. Curses on thee, cruel iron!_

_And Atreyu, seeing that nothing would come of a madman locked in caverns of stone, relented enough to purge the poison and free Iron from the grip of its malice, enough to walk the world again, a man whole and lucid. He took his post as Fäärslaad's mage, learning all there was to learn from books and from the ocean, from bard-tales and heathland, and the folk, in time, forgot what he'd done, what he'd been, and learned to love him. He grew tall like the marsh-reeds in winter. He grew wise and he learned the strength of the iron in his own blood._

_Atreyu watched, and he bided his time, for of that he had limitless supply, and he patiently steeled his child for the war he knew would come._

* * *

><p>Soufien was weak. Weaker than he'd ever felt, and he knew, even as he dragged himself to the window, that his time was running out. He'd always known that he couldn't prolong his life forever, not here in Sanctuary where the heat melted his bones, but it seemed a cruel blow for his time to end now, just when he'd found….<p>

He shook his head. Thinking about her would do no good, would not keep him here no matter how much he wanted to stay. And, he reminded himself, she had only the normal span of years, since she had no magic. One way or another, they would have to part. She'd packed up the things he'd brought her, and a couple of his books he'd said she could have, and was now waiting for him to recoup his strength enough to carry them both to the Eastern Seaboard. She'd given him her wyrm's name, but though he called the beast, there was no answer.

'She won't listen to me,' he said with a weary sigh. 'No animal will.'

'It's getting worse, isn't it?'

He winced. How could he not hide this from her? How was it she knew everything that he felt?

He didn't answer; there was no point, and she didn't press him.

'I've made tea,' she said, and placed a cup by his hand on the windowsill. 'It's only tea, so don't look like that! If you needed painkillers you'd say, I'm sure.' She poked her tongue out at him, but there was no light in her eyes as she looked at him.

Now was the time to say it, then. 'I'm going to Vertland, Hanna. Years ago, I did something terrible...and now I have to stop it from fulfilling its curse.'

'Yes? And what might this thing be, that you have to stop? And what is its curse? Come on, Serthesen! If you don't tell me, I'll ask my father. I bet he _knows_.'

_Yes, I bet he bloody does as well. He'd be the first to hear, probably from Erismen too. Nice of them to tell me!_

'My son.'

Silence. He'd known she wouldn't take it well, but he had expected her to say something. Even if it was just to swear the air blue.

'He wasn't supposed to be born. I was supposed to have killed his mother in the act. But I let them both live, sent them to Fäärslaad, and ran away to Cartha. Anything to say, Hanna? Don't bother - I've heard it all before.'

'You're a bloody _liar_.'

He could see shock on her face, but what put it there, he wondered? The fact he had a son, or mention of the old, brutal rites? 'I am _not_ a liar. But it doesn't matter, does it, Hanna? You'll still ask Käithenal.'

'Of course I will.' She flashed him a bitter, angry glance, and he recoiled. She rose. 'What_ever_. Are you ready?'

'Of course, there is the chance I will lose my life in this,' he said, with a glance upward through his lashes.

'I can't help that, can I?' She picked up her bag. Her face was stony. 'Can we _go_?'

_She wants to see me die. Is that why she came in the beginning? To watch me die and tell her father that he's finally free of me?_

He tried again. 'I should never have made you stay, and I'm sorry. I should have lifted the curse. It will be better for you if you go back to him.'

'Better?' She almost spat the word, fuelled with fury. 'Who are you to say what will be _better_ for me? I belong here, with you, and I won't leave you to die alone.'

That shocked him more than her anger, and his eyes flared wide. Were those tears he saw, glistening in her lovely blue eyes?

She turned away.

'I am not about to go just yet,' he smiled, trying to dispel the sorrow that gulfed between them. He was wrong about her, he knew, but still...it was easier to believe that she was here to hurt him than to think she might love him. He grimaced. Perhaps, he thought, more reflection on the irony of pain would help him solve this problem.

She turned her eyes on him, and he felt the full force of her anger and fear.

'But I'm right, aren't I?' she said. 'It gets worse every day, I can see that, you can't hide it, Soufien, so stop trying. And stop being so stubborn!'

There was no denying it, he knew. It pained him to even move, and shuffling from one side of the room to another was all he could manage before the agony caught at his iron will and came screaming out. He knew the effect that had on her, had seen the fear and panic in her face as she ran to help him. But she_ couldn't_ help him. There was nothing, nothing at all she could do.

'You're ready, you say? Then let's go.'

She protested, she argued, she even went as far as to threaten to throw all his herbs out of the window, and herself too if he didn't stop her, but he remained implacable and hardened his face towards her. He showed her a man closed to her, immovable in his resolve to send her away, but inside he slowly crumbled as he prepared to lose her forever.

* * *

><p><em>Sword practice. That was one thing Erismen insisted upon, that they know how to handle a weapon. There were times, she said, when they would not be able to call on sorcery, and then they would need some other way to defend themselves.<em>

_'There are many people in these times who hate those who have mage-craft,' she said. 'Most will merely shun you. Some will hunt you.'_

_She handed a long, slim blade to Käithenal. 'Perfectly balanced, tempered steel,' she said. To Serthesen she gave two fat curved knives. He weighed them in each hand. Heavy blades, and sharp. He twirled them through his fingers, and fancied he could almost hear the air slice in two. Käithenal had the greater reach with his long blade, but Serthesen, a smaller, slighter man, had the greater agility. She was not playing favourites. She'd matched them evenly. Skill would swing it one way or the other._

_He looked Käithenal in the eye, ice on storm. 'Ready when you are,' he said._

_Käithenal flashed his quick smile, and took the swordsman's stance, feet apart, sword up, the other arm held away from his body for balance. He'd need fast footwork to beat Serthesen, and he was ready._

_Serthesen took no stance at all, but held his knives loose, his arms relaxed at his sides. He bounced lightly on the balls of his soft-booted feet. Only his eyes gave any hint that he was on his guard. Käithenal dropped his gaze to Serthesen's long silver-armoured fingers on his knife hilts – and that was his first mistake. Serthesen's left hand came up, curving towards his opponent's unprotected cheek. Käithenal's attention flicked to that deadly blade, and he did not see Serthesen's right arm flick out, under the arc of Käithenal's arms, to slice through the leather jerkin that protected his flanks._

_A sharp pain checked his movements, and he cursed, swung with his sword, and narrowly missed Serthesen's throat as he stepped nimbly backwards out of reach._

_'You'll have to do better than that,' said the ice-haired mage with a slight smile that didn't touch his wary eyes. Käithenal gritted his teeth._

_'You don't say,' he growled, and lunged, drew back at the last moment, and turned the lunge into a curving swipe to the left that caught Serthesen on the shoulder as he tried to twist out of the way._

_And then they let hell loose on each other._

_It had always been like that between them, the wary, subtle testing, followed by a fight to the near-death, intense and impassioned. No quarter was asked or given, and as always it was only Erismen's order to stop that prevented them cutting each other to ribbons._

_Käithenal curled his arm around Serthesen's shoulders. 'You'll need stitches for that one,' he said, nodding at a long gash in Serthesen's fore-arm. 'Want me to do it?'_

_'After I've stitched you up,' replied Serthesen, and held aside a fold of torn of cloth, exposing a bloody wound in Käithenal's flank – the first he'd inflicted, for that session at least._

_And as always, the violence ended the way it had begun, in friendship. The Sun and the Moon, Erismen called them, and declared that neither could exist without the other._


	12. Windrider

Yani Ervälä, herder and erstwhile warrior, braced himself and turned his face to the fierce wind that blew across the snow-covered steppe. He was used to it. Iskalla was cloaked in ice and snow for much of the year; the people had learned to adapt, and to use the harsh environment to their advantage.

He was typical of the Iskallan folk, being tall and wiry with hair so blonde it looked spun from ice and sunlight, and he was also dressed in the typical Iskallan garb of brightly-embroidered supple hides, his fur-lined hood turned up against the wind. The thick overcoat hid a breastplate of metal leaves, battered and dented through years of use. It wasn't his; it was, he was ready to admit, an item he'd stolen from an enemy in battle. The other man had come off much, much worse, but Yani still bore a long and ragged scar down the side of his long nose. He was proud of it, this memento from the only battle he'd ever fought, for he'd seen less than twenty summers and was still wet around the ears, or so his father said with a grimace when Yani's daydreaming took his attention away from his task.

But battle was not a way of life for many Iskallans, who spent their days driving their sleds over the snow after the vast reindeer herds, or coasting the waters of the Northern ocean in search of the huge grey whales, valuable for flesh and oil and bone. But battle was exactly what Yani was looking for – or would be, once he reached his destination.

_Vertland. _

Its name was a lie, at least these days. It was not green, not green at all. Thick ice crusted whatever green it had once had, ice bent and broke the trees and cracked the ancient standing stones so that nothing was left of the old temples but rubble and ruin.

He'd travelled across the border several times, a little way, when the reindeer strayed into the other country. But the borderland was forest and foothill; nothing there to worry about, save the odd wolf. Beyond that was the real Vertland, and Yani had heard things about it. For one, it had once had a mage. Two, its ice wasn't natural. It was, he'd heard, the result of the mage's power gone sour. It never changed, that ice. No hint of Spring and certainly nothing of Summer. He wondered at the wisdom he displayed in choosing to travel there, but still; the old seer had said he must go, so he went. He set great store by what the seer told him, as did all Iskallans. They had no mage, just seers and star-singers, wind-riders and ice-dreamers. It was not magic. It was merely the knowledge, centuries old, of how to read the secrets of the universe. Yani did not have the knack – he lived by iron, and iron dulled a man's connection to the stars.

He hefted his pack onto the back of the sled, checked his ropes, and climbed aboard. It was a supple thing, this wide carrier of hide and frozen seal-skin shod with iron, strong and fast. His dogs wagged their tales expectantly.

He gathered up the harness. '_Liikkua!'_

The tower was nothing but a ruin, a pile of stones hunkered down among the low hills of Vertland's centre. It seemed a lonely, sorrowful place, though two leagues hence was a small iron-mining community. Yani found himself lodgings in the house of a grizzled old miner, and settled in to wait. He had silver and therefore nobody minded an Iskallan stranger among them who did nothing but drink in the tavern and exercise his dogs across the snow. There were other Iskallans there, including two warriors with their hair braided and beaded – the mark of skilled fighters who had made many kills. Yani wore no braids or beads, and his angular face was shaven.

'Where you from, boy?'

Yani glanced at the man who'd spoken, a dark-haired, arrogant Korgrimmi with unusually angular eyes and high, wide cheekbones.

'Iskalla.'

'I can see that,' said the man, looking Yani over and noting the bright embroidery and reindeer fur of his clothing. '_Where_ in Iskalla?'

'What's it to you?' Yani, though he had nothing to hide, did not appreciate the inclination that he did. He returned the man's stare, ice-blue eyes unblinking and frosty.

The man shrugged. 'Pays to know who people are, round here,' he said. 'Strangers should not remain strangers. Lot of new people in these parts.'

'I come from Yllavärrtaa,' said Yani after a moment's consideration of the man's words. 'Nowhere of note.'

'Nowhere, indeed.' The warrior jabbed a finger at Yani's chest. 'Begs the question though, don't it – why'd you leave?'

_You're Korgrimmi, you wouldn't understand, you godless dog._

Yani shrugged. 'In search of fame and fortune?'

Of course, it wasn't strictly a lie. Fame and fortune were never to be sniffed at, and if they came as a result of other endeavours, they'd be welcome. But Yani wasn't egocentric, and he had nothing on which to spend money. He was here because the seer had seen it in the bones, and the bones never lied.

The Korgrimmi warrior looked as if he might question further, but then he shrugged, and said, 'well, it takes all sorts.'

'I'll drink to that,' said Yani, and raised his cup.

Fame and fortune notwithstanding, he soon found that a good honest day's work was the best way to accumulate silver, and he earned it by ferrying people and goods across the snow in his sled. The only use for the cold iron of his sword was in fending off the wolves he often found himself racing with – a pastime he was used to, having done it more than he cared to in Iskalla. But his dogs flew like the wind over terrain flat and easy, and they left the wolves behind, howling mournfully over the lost meal. They were no match for the Iskallan and his team, no match for iron.

When the wheel of time turned to admit Spring into the world, Yani found a home in Vertland. He'd never come so far looking for love, yet he found it in a young Seaboarder named Torja, the owner of the town's tavern.

And he'd never thought that what began as a brawl could result in something that would change the course of his life.

'More varttir,' he said to the young woman at the bar, pushing his empty glass across the polished wood. Varttir was potent, clear; too much would rot a man's liver and melt his brain. But it could also keep him from freezing to death on the ice, and thus Yani liked to ensure his flask was full as well as his glass.

'You've had enough,' snapped the girl, noting his red eyes and flushed cheeks. In truth the flush in his cheeks had nothing to do with too much liquor and everything to do with her beauty. He didn't think he'd ever seen anyone like her. She wore a jerkin of dyed dragon-hide, and the wide, baggy trousers of a rider, with long boots of grey felt, their toes turned up to a point. Brown hair hung in a long coil down her back – so long, the ends had been tucked into her belt, which also sported a long white-handled knife.

Yani blinked owlishly at her. 'I've barely started,' he said, and tapped the rim of the glass. 'Fill.'

She pushed it back. '_No_.'

'Damn it woman! Who are you to tell me I can't drink?' He pushed a silver crown towards her, along with his glass. 'Is that enough to persuade you?'

'Not nearly,' she said with a contemptuous sneer. 'No silver in the world could persuade me that your liver should rot, Ervälä. You can have beer. _Not_ varttir.'

Yani shook his head. 'I am frozen,' he said. 'I have no woman to keep me warm at night, so I drink varttir. Must I beg?'

She leaned over the bar towards him, grabbed his collar, and yanked him up close. 'I'd like to see _that_.'

Some mischief was at work within Yani, because he had the sudden and overpowering urge to do as she said, and beg. On his knees, if she demanded it. Instead, he covered her hand with his, prised her grip from his collar, and kissed her.

She responded with a punch that knocked him flat, a stool splintered beneath him as he landed heavily on his back to a chorus of cheers and catcalls from the other drinkers.

'You deserved that, Iskallan,' said the fiery bar-keep, and filled his glass with varttir. He knocked it back with a grimace, and gingerly felt his jaw for breakages.

'Still got what I wanted,' he replied, breathless with more than the fact he'd been knocked for six by a woman. In fact, he was impressed and willing to push his luck. 'Can I have another?'

'Drink?' She quirked her eyebrow at him, the look in her eyes challenging and defiant.

'Kiss.'

'Come and get it.'

He did.

She knocked him back again, then vaulted the bar to straddle his hips.

'Now, _Iskallan_,' she said, pinning his arms above his head and leaning forward, 'what do you _really_ want? Varttir, or a woman?'

'Take a guess,' he panted, and grinned at the whistles punctuating their flirtation. He considered he'd done well and had the better end of the bargain. After all, all she was getting was _him_.

And so Yani Ervala moved out of the farmhouse and into Torja's rooms above the inn, and not just into her rooms but into her bed as well.


	13. Brotherhood

_'At least, that's the way it's told now,' said the bard. 'But not by me; this is the first I have spoken of such an event in a young man's life. But not just any young man. You know this one now, my friends, for have you not heard the epic saga of his journey and his return? I think it only fair to tell you all; who he was, where he came from. _

_'I myself was once of this earth, as we all were, born of iron. Born of moon-milk, weaned on iron, thrust into the cold waters of the North and fed on the roots of the forests. But all men carry within them the magesty of the stars, if they haven't forgotten. Yani never forgot.'_

_It was not news to the bard's listeners. They knew that all came from the stars, and all returned. But few remembered the magic that came with them; few indeed, only one man in a thousand years would be born who would remember that magic. Yani was such a man._

_Yani's strong point was loyalty. He was, said the bard, 'as constant as the stars and as stubborn as the rocks of the mountain,' but such men, he said, made the world. 'And the like of this man, the world hadn't seen for long years – more than we could remember. He carried a sword and called himself a man of iron, a warrior, but that was a lie. He did not know anything of iron, though he cased him round in its cold, hard embrace. What he knew was the wind.'_

_The man who sat beside him nodded in agreement. 'In the Iskallan tongue, Ervälä is a corruption of 'erraía-välä', which means 'wind-rider'. Somehow, I had never given it any thought.'_

_The bard snorted. 'I don't expect you did. You were bound to iron.' He sliced up a sausage on its plate and took a piece. 'And you hadn't even met him, then, this Erán Nargaard.'_

_The pale-haired warrior stretched his long legs out under the table and slouched in his seat, his one remaining arm across his stomach in a futile gesture of protection. He'd lost the other, his sword arm, in the great battle. 'And his like I've never met. He cast chains about me I could not break. That bond was stronger than the one I swore to the Winter mage – far stronger.'_

_'Not your fault,' said the bard. In truth, he had cursed himself ten times over for that little mistake, but then how could he have known that the two mages would bear the same mark, and that Yani would get them mixed up? How could the Iskallan known, if he, Margrimm, didn't?_

_Like father, like son._

_He was aware, as most gods are, that there was much outside his control. He could do little more than nudge and hint and hope that he would be understood….and Yani had been a more than willing pawn, patient and philosophical. Being Iskallan, he understood better than most the omens that were sent his way, and followed the paths laid out for him._

_'I cursed my life that day,' said Yani quietly. 'I had not envisaged my future in such a way.'_

_'A man who rides as you did - alone under the stars - can never call on destiny to come to his aid.' Margrimm paused. His clear eyes bored deep into the Iskallan's soul, seeing there exactly that - destiny. Sometimes the gods kept the slate of a man pristine clean, so that they might write upon it themselves when the time came. For the Vanir, as he was, they could only watch, and wait._

_He smiled, a sunny expression which widened and brought with it a silvery laugh. 'Windrider, yes,' he said with delight. 'As I am! I suppose then, that I must call you brother, Yani Ervälä!'_

_'Well I'll drink to that,' smiled Yani, and raised his cup high._


End file.
